The Maiden and the Monster

As the principalities in high places are in the process of appointing a new people in America, all the old symbols undergo quiet renovation, and are being filled with alien content in accordance with the alien outlooks settling our lands. Or, if they prove especially inconvenient to the new order, they are simply scuttled.

In my generation the iconic Uncle Sam image was still known, if just barely so. The only recent example in popular media I can think of in fact was the masterfully illustrated, albeit decidedly subversive, graphic novel Uncle Sam, wherein the old WASP coot is overcome with White guilt and descends into a fit of despair over the legacy of Manifest Destiny and the like, at length denouncing his country. But the image of Uncle Sam best known to the previous era is from James Flagg’s WWI “I Want You!” recruitment poster, the likeness of which is uncannily reminiscent of war-era CSA president Jefferson Davis.

But due to his inherent Anglo-Christian image, Uncle Sam is antithetical to the burgeoning multicult and must therefore fall unsung alongside his brethren, Brother Jonathan, Johnny Reb, and Lady Columbia.

Even though we rarely see personifications of America anymore, I’m rather amazed at how much less we’ve seen of Lady Columbia in particular from the mid-twentieth century onward. So precipitous was her early-twentieth-century demise that she is all but entirely unheard of by the Babyboom generation forward.

Existing in concept from 1697 when Justice Samuel Sewall (of Salem Witch Trial fame) wrote of beauteous Columbina, a feminized derivative of the name Columbus, Columbia preceded the existence of the United States by nearly a century, and therefore necessarily preceded the nickname “Uncle Sam” which our revolutionary soldiers derived from the abbreviated title U.S. “Hail Columbia” was sang at George Washington’s coronation and remained the de facto national anthem all the way up to 1931 when “The Star-Spangled Banner” replaced it by an act of government.

But Columbia’s decline in popularity coincides with two major events.

First, in the wake of the tragedy of ‘the Great War’, Americans seem to have reflected on the chivalric imagery of Lady Columbia knighting soldiers for the crusade against her sister Germania with a sense of great regret. For Christendom as a whole was demoralized therein by our having sunken to acts of barbarism previously thought the domain of heathens only. And as an internecine war of Christendom, Americans perceived that the most avoidable cataclysm had merely prostrated the kingdom of God on earth before her enemies. Columbia’s virginal robes were now blood-soaked and we could no longer look on her the same way. In hindsight we knew foreign moneyed powers had ravaged her. Her innocence was lost.

Secondly, and most ironically, the fledgling Feminist movement reviled this regal maid motif because it presupposed the virtues of chastity and purity and the old conviction of guarding the racial seedbed of the nation – the old Christian ideals of maidenhood. Thus did Lady Columbia prove an offense to their progressive schemes.

So it was that right and left, albeit for very different reasons, struck a tacit concord to disregard the maiden.

But today, if we had to construct a personification of the new America – the American empire which has overtaken the American nation – it would be femme without a hint of femininity. She would have to be loosed of all the old restraints: she would be immodest in dress and attitude. Garishly tattooed, she would be obnoxiously pierced and bespectacled, prescription or no. Her hair would resemble no natural hue. She would be overweight and proud of it. And she’d declare herself beautiful if only to spite Western beauty norms, which is to say, to spite God-ordained aesthetics. Her Lesbianism would be of a set with her Wiccanism, or if trans-gendered, her LaVeyan Satanism. And she would of course be racially ambiguous, if not trans-racial. And she might identify by alien pronouns.

Ehud Would is a Conservative Presbyterian of Scandian-Germano-Celtic background and a refugee from the reconquista state of Southern California, who having recently followed the Northwest Imperative, resettled his family in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho where he pursues writing, illustration, medical administration, and presides as an elected official.

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Faith & Heritage is a consortium of Christian writers from a traditionalist perspective. F&H features a diverse range of opinions among its writers, and any particular opinion expressed is not necessarily indicative of universal agreement among F&H admins or writers.

The superhero genre was one of the last quasi-traditional genres of American pop culture. Batman, Superman, and the other assorted heroes and villains literally came out of the early twentieth-century[…]

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Remember the days of old; consider the years of many generations; ask your father, and he will show you, your elders, and they will tell you. When the Most High gave to the nations their inheritance, when he divided mankind, he fixed the borders of the peoples according to the number of the sons of God. - Deuteronomy 32:7-8